Systems, data, and knowledge

In the previous post I said that I was going to 'list all the things' to consider.

So I went for a walk this morning¹ and realised that doing so would be jumping ahead to Workbook section 20-29 Discovery.

I'm not ready for that yet.

Because there is so much in my life, I would hardly know where to start discovering.

So let's step back.

Where do I even look?

Johnny.Decimal was conceived as a way to organise your files. But as technology progresses, we need to think more broadly.

If you want to organise your digital life, you need to look at systems, data, and knowledge.

Systems

So of course your file system is one system. But here's a bunch of others I can think of, in no particular order:

• Email.

• Any sort of physical note.

• Any other physical artefact.

• Digital notes. I bet you have more than one app?

• Databases, e.g. Airtable.

• Social media. Forum, Discord, Mastodon. At work this might be Teams or Slack. Instagram or TikTok if that's your thing.

• To-do/reminders.

• Calendar.

• Bookmarks and other management of online history. All of your open browser tabs that you don't dare close.

• Music, photos, TV, movies (typically managed by another application).

• All of your different file systems: your local drives; cloud drives; external drives.

• Backups.

• Apps that store data in their own sandbox: very common now on Apple's platforms. This includes the per-app folders in your iCloud Drive.

• Any other app that has its own data store.

  • e.g. my beloved Bear, which manages your notes in an internal database: they're not .txt files in a file-system folder.²

• Bookmark-like data in other applications, e.g. Maps.

• Contacts.

• Private messages and group chats, probably across multiple apps.

• Passwords and other security keys, e.g. SSH.

• Code repositories, as they're often distributed (e.g. GitHub) and might not live in your base ~/Documents folder.

  • I have mine at ~/dev so that it doesn't synchronise up to iCloud.³

That's what I came up with just by looking at the open applications on my Mac right now. There will be more.⁴

If you don't mind me saying so: holy shit! Life got complex.

Data and knowledge

These are similar, and possibly even the same thing: I need to give this more consideration.

But for now we can say that your systems serve to contain data and knowledge.

Here I define data as a large thing that takes work to [re]create. A photograph is data. A PDF is data. An Excel spreadsheet is data.

Knowledge is something that originated in your brain⁵ that you could -- assuming you haven't forgotten it -- recall and write down. It's smaller than data. It's someone's birthday; a recipe; places you'd like to go for dinner; a memory to take the bins out on Thursday.

I don't know what to do with this yet, or whether the data/knowledge split is required or useful.

This is why I can't just tell you what to do

If I wanted to, I could probably prescriptively, definitively tell you how to manage your file system.

It should be clear that I can't do this for 'all of the systems and data and knowledge' in your life. It's just too much. It changes too often.

New systems are introduced all the time. We each use different systems for different reasons.

Instead, I need to give you the tools and techniques to be able to integrate these systems into your life as needed.

My scope

Okay, this is what we came here for. Can I define my scope yet?⁶

I think so. Here's what I plan to discover and organise.

All of the systems and data and knowledge in my life.

🤯

I better get on with it! See you next time.